Instead of searching for books that tell me about success, which shows up the same hit list, I went onto Amazon and find books that tell me why I'm/we're wrong because I think they're likely to be underrated and unpopular.

In life there seems to be a pretty clear default path in terms of societal, parental and personal expectations: go to college, get a job, get married, have kids. In addition to the default general path, there is a default choice for each of these: continue doing whatever it is you are doing. The easiest thing to do is to stay in your current job, live in your current city, in your current apartment, with your current significant other. Time spent in a default position seems to create a momentum of its own on that position across all categories.

The reality is that we are generally lazy and don’t take the time to question either our general life direction or the specific choices within that direction. Yet, many of these results come from happenstance or circumstance.

The last thing we want is to wake up late in life realizing we have been running in the wrong direction. Because we are so busy living on a day-to-day basis, I find that it’s important to take the time to take a step back and be deliberately introspective about life’s major decisions. To do so I created a process and framework for making these decisions.

Accelerating technology adoption. Why the telephone took 50+ years to adopt, but the mobile phone was <10 years
Three historical examples and their modern antecedents
Content marketing. The origin of the Michelin Guide and why content marketing still works
Viral growth. How chain letters were invented and rethinking its effectiveness in the framework of viral growth
Marketplaces. How to bootstrap marketplace businesses and the cold-start problem, and what the story of toothpaste can tell us about that
The most exciting new technologies coming around the corner, and how to evaluate them for producing new startups
Video. Why video is big, and will get even bigger
Offline. How the offline-to-online channel has been used by scooters and rideshare, to great effect
My investing thesis. The intersection of growth hacking, new tech, and pre-existing consumer motivations
Closing. Technology changes, but people stay the same